DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:LAST WEEKEND I was at a ball in the Park Hotel organised by Showjumping Ireland. The place was full of wiry men, meticulously groomed and shaved, in tuxedos, partnered with beautiful women in evening gowns, and lots of teenagers with golden fringes and bouncing curls. It was a glittering affair where the spot prizes included a series of free dental visits for a horse, and free services from a famous stallion (for a mare, I suppose).
The General was with me. I asked him how his father was, after the prostate operation.
He said: “I’m afraid if he goes on much longer we will have to shoot him.”
The General talks like that. He is about 10 years my senior and his family have lived near Mullingar since the time of Henry VIII. He was never in anybody’s army, but his patriarchal certitude about the cosmos and his politically incorrect allusions to hunting, whenever women are in the social mix, earned him the nickname.
There’s nothing I enjoy more than a morning stroll with the General; to walk aimlessly around the busy town as the sunlight falls down on the narrow streets and shafts of it slant through the windows of the Harbour Mall and a grey-haired musician outside the shopping centre plays a mellow tin whistle that throws a rich soundtrack over the accidental buzz of all this town life.
The General struts the streets like a loose bull, gawking at the silver-lipped teenagers, the struggling mothers, the screaming buggy babies, the tall, booted Slavs and the little pot-bellied men who walk small dogs along the canal. The General asserts that pot-bellied men so resemble monks carved on ancient monuments that one cannot resist the idea that such was the shape and size of the earliest inhabitants of this island.
“The Fir Bolg,” he calls them. “The belly men.”
Some mornings the General and I take coffee in Cafe le Monde, or at lunchtime we might eat a bowl of Mamma Lingi’s pasta on the corner of Grove Street and Blackhall Court. One day I asserted that Lingi’s little parlour was almost as good as the wonderful Roma cafe on Bride Street in Cavan.
“I have never been to Cavan,” the General replied rather dismissively.
Across the road, Wisteria had a big “Sale” sign in the window, and a man was coming out of Stars and Bows, the hobby and craft shop, with a model of the Titanic under his arm. To our left we could hear the laughter of women from the open door of the hair salon, Reflections. We were eating slices of pizza on the street.
“This is delicious,” I said.
The general agreed. “I have heard it said,” he told me, “that sometimes the hairdresser orders slices for her clients if they’re a bit low on sugar or unhappy with their husbands.”
“Do you know,” he added, “that a good hairdresser is better than a psychotherapist, and only half the price?”
We were staring at the boarding across the street. I wondered what was behind it.
He said: “That’s where the archaeologists found the remains of all the monks a few years ago. There was a lot of pride in Mullingar when they found those monks. They had shells around their necks that showed that they had done pilgrimages in Europe.”
“Mullingar was always European,” he added, wiping his lips.
Then his eyes darkened. “Banana boxes!” he declared. “Disgraceful!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Banana boxes,” he repeated. “That’s how the saints left Mullingar. In banana boxes! After sleeping peacefully beneath the car park for 800 years, they were sent off to some storeroom in banana boxes. It was just no way to treat holy men.”
He was becoming emotionally volatile, so I changed the subject.
“I have abandoned my barber,” I declared.
“Why so?”
“Well,” I said, “for a start, I never get offered a slice of pizza when I’m depressed. And the last time I was there he wanted to cut the hairs in my ears.”
“And did you let him?”
“Of course I let him. How could I stop him?”
The general was horrified.
“You have gone far beyond the help of a hairdresser,” he said. “You definitely need a psychiatrist.”
“And there are machines nowadays,” he added, slightly embarrassed by the delicacy of the subject, “for the ears."
